Jesus of Galilee (as the principal figure of the “New Testament” Gospels) should be understood to be a Spiritual Master of the fifth stage degree. He stood apart from institutions and the institutionalization of his function. He was a simple itinerant, a wanderer. He spoke very critically of many things, and was, essentially, simply blessing people – with his healing Blessing, his teaching Blessing, and (in the case of those who were sufficiently prepared) his Spiritual Blessing.

There is a tradition that suggests Jesus Transmitted his Spiritual Blessing privately, to an “inner circle” of those of his followers who were most prepared to receive the (fifth stage) esoteric Instruction and the Spiritual Transmission that would enable them to participate in Divine Communion through the internally upturned psycho-physical process of Spiritual development and Spiritual Ascent.

There is “Ascension” language in the Gospels (and in the early part of the Book of Acts) that should (rightly) be regarded to be “concretization” — metaphors for the “inner-circle” teaching and the Spiritually Baptizing work of Jesus. Reflected in the metaphors of the stories of Jesus of Galilee is the tradition of both exoteric (or outer, or public) teachings and esoteric (or inner, hidden, and, therefore, secret) teachings or teachings relative to the domain of the public beginner as well as teachings relative to the “inner-circle” domain of the mature devotee (or the esoteric domain of the directly Spiritual teachings and of the direct Spiritual Transmission-work).

Many scholars say that numerous stories in the “New Testament” Gospels are not part of the “original” tradition (or real biography”) of Jesus — such as, for instance, the story of Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night, and to whom Jesus said, “You must be born again, in Spirit.”

Whether that visit actually happened does not make any difference. That story and others like it are a fundamental part of what is conveyed through the total body of stories about the lifetime of Jesus and his work and his doings and sayings.

The Nicodemus story is an important communication, because it clearly indicates that the message of Jesus is a Spiritually-based message, and that Jesus was a Spiritual worker, a Spirit-Transmitter, whose teaching is about Spiritual transformation, a conversion of life, a fundamental purification of the life, such that the life can, thereafter, be turned (and Spiritually conveyed) to What is Above. Such turning does not occur by a physical act of going up into the sky, but by subtle (internal psycho-physical) Ascent, by means of the esoteric Spiritual process, into the inner space which is sometimes metaphorically called the “sky of mind”.

Clearly, the esotericism of Spiritual Ascent is a fundamental substructure that underlies the “New Testament” tradition. The “official” Christian tradition that was built upon the substructure that is Spiritual esotericism strategically suppresses certain elements (specifically, those known as “gnostic”), and it, otherwise, “concretizes” (or converts into a physical event) even such things as the “Ascension” of Jesus (which, in fact, is a reference to Jesus’ own life-practice of upward Spiritual absorption, and, also, a reference to his “inner-circle” teachings about that same process otherwise referred to via cryptic references to the “secrets of the Kingdom of God”).

The newly emerging institutional (or “official” and public) Christian tradition did all of this in order to prevent the “Ascension” from being viewed as merely speculative and “mystical” and “gnostic”-and, thus, to prevent the story of Jesus’ fictional “Ascension” from conveying a “too-Spiritual” (and, necessarily, esoteric, or non-public) teaching.